Conceptualizations of childhood, pedagogy and educational research in the postmodern : A critical interpretation

Over the last fifty years the debate between modernism and postmodernism has surfaced in the disciplines of social sciences. Epistemologically, there is a shift away from the concept of a “found” world, “out there”, objective, knowable and factual, towards a concept of “constructed” worlds, thus problematizing postulates based on the autonomous, stable, unified, essentialized, coherent and integrated subject capable of rational action, and opening up spaces for a new understanding of subjectivity that is based on provisionality and contingency. From the ashes of these tendencies for fragmentation has arisen what is called the New Sociology of Childhood and the new directions in pedagogy and research creating new spaces for constructing notions of children and childhoods. The emergent child has an active agency making it possible to construct a more dynamic child, located in a multiplicity of domains, thus opening up spaces for more flexible pedagogies and new sensibilities in educational research. I have therefore undertaken a critical reading of texts in the area of childhood, pedagogy and educational research within the modern and the postmodern in order to extract, appropriate and integrate parallel but socially constructed discourses across disciplines such as Sociology of Childhood, Sociology of Knowledge and Sociology of Education. I aim to reconstruct the concept of childhood both historically and within modernist/ postmodernist paradigm. I finally try to sift out and document some of the implications for study of childhood, as well as for pedagogical practices and educational research resulting from the paradigmatic shift from modernity to postmodernity. Finally postmodern constructs are problematized and a critical postmodernist position is invoked in order to straddle progressive aspects of modernity and postmodernity

Structuring of Modern and Postmodern Identities with Reflections on the Pedagogical Implications in a Multicultural World

This essay explores the different discourses that intersect to define and explain the concept of "identity" and consists of two distinct parts. The former being an attempt to eclecticize the discourses around identity and the structuring of identity under modern and post-modern conditions. The latter consisting of reflections on the methodological and pedagogical implications in a fragmenting postmodern and multicultural condition. This essay is a theoretical attempt to deconstruct the notion of the essentialized, stable, static and coherent modernist subjectivity/identity and tries to explore the construction of a multilayered, non-unitary, fragmented, plural postmodern subjectivity/identity. The essay aims to discusses the current politics of `identity´, `difference´, `recognition´ and `multiculturalism´ and explores the intricate enmeshing of concepts such as identity, ethnicity, minorities and nationalism. It further tries to construct the representation of identities within a world-systems paradigm. Modernity is seen as being convergent and a result of capital accumulation resulting in globalisation. Post-modernity is seen as a condition of fragmentation due to capital flight, resulting in discontinuities between different forms of collective and individual life. The deconstruction of modernist identity has methodological and pedagogical implications. This fragmentation and disintegration of stable hegemony has emancipatory potential within research. It has led to the decline of writing the "Other". Writing the "Other" is seen as a violence, as it silences and disallows the other from representing themselves. Mere ethnographic observation needs to give way to a dialogic methodology. This has resulted in a focus in research on self-definition, self-identification, autobiographical and local narratives and a replacement of flawed grand narratives. It has also led to a new awareness of pluralism and diversity and articulation of a cultural politics in which culture is bound up with power and resistance. Feminist identity perspectives have strengthened research methodologies by creating empowering and self-reflexive research designs - concerned with producing emancipatory knowledge and empowering the researched. Pedagogically, from the perspective of postmodernism, modernist authority privileges western patriarchal culture and represses and marginalizes the voices of the subordinated. Hence the essay suggests the need for practicing "critical pedagogy" that views education as a political, social and cultural enterprise, and "border pedagogy" that incorporates the notion of difference as an ideal. In practice the culturally divergent fragmented postmodern condition calls for advocating policies of multiculturalism and multiligualism in education

Mapping the human cortical surface by combining quantitative T(1) with retinotopy

We combined quantitative relaxation rate (R1= 1/T1) mapping-to measure local myelination-with fMRI-based retinotopy. Gray-white and pial surfaces were reconstructed and used to sample R1 at different cortical depths. Like myelination, R1 decreased from deeper to superficial layers. R1 decreased passing from V1 and MT, to immediately surrounding areas, then to the angular gyrus. High R1 was correlated across the cortex with convex local curvature so the data was first "de-curved". By overlaying R1 and retinotopic maps, we found that many visual area borders were associated with significant R1 increases including V1, V3A, MT, V6, V6A, V8/VO1, FST, and VIP. Surprisingly, retinotopic MT occupied only the posterior portion of an oval-shaped lateral occipital R1 maximum. R1 maps were reproducible within individuals and comparable between subjects without intensity normalization, enabling multi-center studies of development, aging, and disease progression, and structure/function mapping in other modalities

New insights into the classification and nomenclature of cortical GABAergic interneurons.

A systematic classification and accepted nomenclature of neuron types is much needed but is currently lacking. This article describes a possible taxonomical solution for classifying GABAergic interneurons of the cerebral cortex based on a novel, web-based interactive system that allows experts to classify neurons with pre-determined criteria. Using Bayesian analysis and clustering algorithms on the resulting data, we investigated the suitability of several anatomical terms and neuron names for cortical GABAergic interneurons. Moreover, we show that supervised classification models could automatically categorize interneurons in agreement with experts' assignments. These results demonstrate a practical and objective approach to the naming, characterization and classification of neurons based on community consensus

Quantifying single nucleotide variant detection sensitivity in exome sequencing

BACKGROUND: The targeted capture and sequencing of genomic regions has rapidly demonstrated its utility in genetic studies. Inherent in this technology is considerable heterogeneity of target coverage and this is expected to systematically impact our sensitivity to detect genuine polymorphisms. To fully interpret the polymorphisms identified in a genetic study it is often essential to both detect polymorphisms and to understand where and with what probability real polymorphisms may have been missed. RESULTS: Using down-sampling of 30 deeply sequenced exomes and a set of gold-standard single nucleotide variant (SNV) genotype calls for each sample, we developed an empirical model relating the read depth at a polymorphic site to the probability of calling the correct genotype at that site. We find that measured sensitivity in SNV detection is substantially worse than that predicted from the naive expectation of sampling from a binomial. This calibrated model allows us to produce single nucleotide resolution SNV sensitivity estimates which can be merged to give summary sensitivity measures for any arbitrary partition of the target sequences (nucleotide, exon, gene, pathway, exome). These metrics are directly comparable between platforms and can be combined between samples to give “power estimates” for an entire study. We estimate a local read depth of 13X is required to detect the alleles and genotype of a heterozygous SNV 95% of the time, but only 3X for a homozygous SNV. At a mean on-target read depth of 20X, commonly used for rare disease exome sequencing studies, we predict 5–15% of heterozygous and 1–4% of homozygous SNVs in the targeted regions will be missed. CONCLUSIONS: Non-reference alleles in the heterozygote state have a high chance of being missed when commonly applied read coverage thresholds are used despite the widely held assumption that there is good polymorphism detection at these coverage levels. Such alleles are likely to be of functional importance in population based studies of rare diseases, somatic mutations in cancer and explaining the “missing heritability” of quantitative traits

Whole-Exome Sequencing in the Differential Diagnosis of Primary Adrenal Insufficiency in Children.

Adrenal insufficiency is a rare, but potentially fatal medical condition. In children, the cause is most commonly congenital and in recent years a growing number of causative gene mutations have been identified resulting in a myriad of syndromes that share adrenal insufficiency as one of the main characteristics. The evolution of adrenal insufficiency is dependent on the variant and the particular gene affected, meaning that rapid and accurate diagnosis is imperative for effective treatment of the patient. Common practice is for candidate genes to be sequenced individually, which is a time-consuming process and complicated by overlapping clinical phenotypes. However, with the availability, and increasing cost effectiveness of whole-exome sequencing, there is the potential for this to become a powerful diagnostic tool. Here, we report the results of whole-exome sequencing of 43 patients referred to us with a diagnosis of familial glucocorticoid deficiency (FGD) who were mutation negative for MC2R, MRAP, and STAR the most commonly mutated genes in FGD. WES provided a rapid genetic diagnosis in 17/43 sequenced patients, for the remaining 60% the gene defect may be within intronic/regulatory regions not covered by WES or may be in gene(s) representing novel etiologies. The diagnosis of isolated or familial glucocorticoid deficiency was only confirmed in 3 of the 17 patients, other genetic diagnoses were adrenal hypo- and hyperplasia, Triple A, and autoimmune polyendocrinopathy syndrome type I, emphasizing both the difficulty of phenotypically distinguishing between disorders of PAI and the utility of WES as a tool to achieve this

Using high angular resolution diffusion imaging data to discriminate cortical regions

Brodmann's 100-year-old summary map has been widely used for cortical localization in neuroscience. There is a pressing need to update this map using non-invasive, high-resolution and reproducible data, in a way that captures individual variability. We demonstrate here that standard HARDI data has sufficiently diverse directional variation among grey matter regions to inform parcellation into distinct functional regions, and that this variation is reproducible across scans. This characterization of the signal variation as non-random and reproducible is the critical condition for successful cortical parcellation using HARDI data. This paper is a first step towards an individual cortex-wide map of grey matter microstructure, The gray/white matter and pial boundaries were identified on the high-resolution structural MRI images. Two HARDI data sets were collected from each individual and aligned with the corresponding structural image. At each vertex point on the surface tessellation, the diffusion-weighted signal was extracted from each image in the HARDI data set at a point, half way between gray/white matter and pial boundaries. We then derived several features of the HARDI profile with respect to the local cortical normal direction, as well as several fully orientationally invariant features. These features were taken as a fingerprint of the underlying grey matter tissue, and used to distinguish separate cortical areas. A support-vector machine classifier, trained on three distinct areas in repeat 1 achieved 80-82% correct classification of the same three areas in the unseen data from repeat 2 in three volunteers. Though gray matter anisotropy has been mostly overlooked hitherto, this approach may eventually form the foundation of a new cortical parcellation method in living humans. Our approach allows for further studies on the consistency of HARDI based parcellation across subjects and comparison with independent microstructural measures such as ex-vivo histology